What does a wish cost? Two new middle grade novels tackle this age-old question in fresh ways. Both star down-on-their-luck boys being raised by single moms in tough circumstances. And both take a gimlet-eyed look at the price of gifts that supposedly come with no strings attached.
Oliver Bakh in RETURN TO SENDER (Roaring Brook, 320 pp., $18.99, ages 8 to 12), written and illustrated by Vera Brosgol, is a fifth grader from the wrong side of the subway tracks, a native Queens kid forced after the death of his father — a chef and budding restaurateur — to shuttle with his mother between the homes of sympathetic relatives. Until an eccentric, butterfly-collecting aunt bequeaths them a seven-story walk-up apartment in tony Manhattan.
Oliver’s mother takes a custodial job at a nearby private school where, thanks to a staff discount and additional work on the side, she’s able to enroll Oliver. Whittle Academy is so fancy it has a satellite — not a satellite school, an actual satellite.
“Our students become industry leaders, world changers!” Oliver’s guidance counselor tells him when she learns of his dream to open the restaurant his father couldn’t. “Have you thought about wanting something more ambitious? How about a franchise?” But Oliver doesn’t want to change the world. He simply wants to perfect his father’s recipes, and fit in at school. The cooking part he’s got down. The fitting in part? Not so much.
When he crumples up a note he regrets having written to his mother in a fit of pique — “I wish we could have delivery pizza tonight like a normal family that isn’t poor” — and tries to hide it from her by cramming it through a mysterious mail slot built into the apartment’s interior wall, the slot sends back a series of minty-smelling typewritten messages. Following their instructions, to turn on the blender and toaster at exactly 6:43 p.m., sets off (unbeknown to him) a chain of Rube Goldberg-esque mishaps in the outside world, ending with an exhausted pizza guy handing the family a free but cold barbecue-chicken-and-peppers pizza.
Oliver makes more wishes, with positive results. He is not “beaten up” by the school bully. “Really cool new sneakers,” to replace his much-mocked drugstore “Comverse” ones, find their way onto his feet. And along the way, he befriends a friendless fourth-grade girl, Colette, who becomes his partner in crime.
As Oliver pours increasingly outlandish desires (that mask a deeper longing for his father) into the magical mail slot — and he’s sucked into the postal multiverse on the other side of it — he slowly realizes the steep cost to others of each wish he’s been granted. No wonder his aunt became a lepidopterist — she was seeing the butterfly effect up close and personal.
Brosgol, a Caldecott honoree and Eisner Award winner, brings a light, humorous touch to the novel’s central questions about fate, loss and acceptance.
Daniel Nayeri and Liz Enright’s graphic novel MIRROR TOWN: The Bizarre Bazaar, Book 1 (Little, Brown Ink, 144 pp., $12.99, ages 8 to 12) treads similar territory but detours down a more comedically sinister path. Lovelorn Abel Azari is about to graduate from elementary school, and his crush, Ginny (who “likes him as a friend”), is about to decamp to her abuela’s ranch for the summer. As he mopes toward home, Abel discovers a new store in town. “Grand Opening! Bring your odd, weird, wonderful,” reads a sign taped to the shop’s front door. Inside the Bizarre Bazaar — whose inventory consists of leftover props from the world’s fairy tales, legends and myths (the monkeys’ paws and thingamabobs discarded after the princes and princesses have escaped to happily ever after) — he meets the mischievous Babs, who along with her co-proprietor, Bruno, accepts payment in cash, trades and souls. Babs intuits that Abel may be in the market for a present for his “pre-girlfriend.” A charm bracelet is just the ticket, but alas its price is too high.
Abel returns, depressed, to his mobile home and asks his mother if she can help him out. “If I had any money,” she replies, “I wouldn’t be working a night job.” The junk his father left behind after deserting the family doesn’t offer much in the way of tradable goods, so Abel agrees to do weekly yardwork for the crabby Mrs. Branley in exchange for an antique mirror.
As he transports his bounty, a bad step on a slippery stone at the edge of a river plunges Abel through the mirror and into an alternate universe in which he is popular, heroic and loved by all, including Ginny. Even better, his father rejoins the family, with a job and plenty of money.
So why, when everything appears to be going so well, does it all feel so wrong?
Nayeri is an Iranian-born author whose own family fled to a new world after his mother’s conversion to Christianity, arriving in Oklahoma by way of an Italian refugee camp — a story he chronicles in his award-winning memoir, “Everything Sad Is Untrue.” One imagines he knows something about feeling dislocated in a place that seems almost (but not quite) like home. Enright’s fun, eye-popping illustrations nicely complement Nayeri’s words.
This first episode of the Bizarre Bazaar series welcomes us into the immortal world of Babs and Bruno. Seeing how they torment future customers will be a treat.
With luck, the butterfly effect from these two lively books will inspire the next generation of wish-makers.
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